Could Singapore’s Safe Management Measures Increase Due to the Spike in Covid-19 Cases?

Even though Singapore has largely managed to get the Covid-19 pandemic under control, we are still seeing new Covid-19 variants which recently caused a significant spike in cases. 

On June 21, 7,109 new Covid-19 cases were reported in Singapore. This is almost double the 3,220 cases reported on Monday.

While case numbers on Tuesday tend to be higher than the rest of the week as a result of the weekend, the country has seen a 23 per cent week-on-week increase in Covid-19 community infections recently. This increase is largely driven by the spread of newer Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5.

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About 30 per cent of the Covid-19 cases recorded in the community in the past week were cases with BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants, as compared to 17 per cent, 8 per cent and 3 per cent for the previous three weeks respectively.

The BA.5 subvariant alone is estimated to contribute to 25 per cent of all cases so far this week, according to the Ministry of Health (MOH). It added that the surge in BA.4 and BA.5 cases is likely to continue because they have higher transmissibility as compared to BA.2.

Of course, as Singapore sees a spike in cases, the main question is if our safe management measures will be tightened in response. 

However, MOH has said that the current measures, which include wearing masks when indoors and vaccination-differentiated measures for some higher-risk activities, will remain.

This is because there has not been a significant increase in Covid-19 patients needing to be hospitalised and the number of cases in intensive care units (ICUs) remains low. That said, bed occupancies in hospitals remain high for non-Covid-19 related issues.

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“To ensure that precious emergency department (ED) resources are available to patients who need urgent emergency care, we strongly advise the public to only seek medical treatment at a hospital’s ED for serious or life-threatening emergencies.

"Patients with minor ailments are strongly urged to seek medical attention at general practitioner clinics,” MOH said.

“MOH will continue genomic surveillance for circulating subvariants in Singapore, including requiring some infected individuals to take an additional government-funded polymerase chain reaction swab for genomic sequencing,” the ministry added in an update on June 21.